There is a hilariously funny cartoon by John Spooner from, The Age (Click here to View) . The Age is normally a warmist publication so it was quite a surprise to see it there.

TRANSCRIPT:

Julia Gillard to Tim Flannery (top picture)“Tim, sorry to drag you in like this. I’m not that upset that you were so wrong about water shortages now that we’re drowing in the stuff. And how were you to know that there would be no statistically significant increase in warming for the last 15 years of increasing CO2 emissions.”

Julia Gillard to Tim Flannery: (lower image)“No! I want to know why I pay you 10 times what Bob Carter gets and he still wins the argument!”

The cartoon is in light of the recent Heartland leak. For our non-Australian visitors, the lady on the left-hand side is our Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard and on the right is Australian Climate Commissioner Tim Flannery. Professor Bob Carter is one of Australia’s leading geologists and a climate realist.

Climate Commissioner Tim Flannery is very much a joke in Australia, he has a list of failed climate change predictions as long as my arm. He gets paid a taxpayer funded $180,000, three-day-a-week salary for his role as part-time chairman of the Australian Government’s Climate Commission.

For many years now, our media outlets have been awash with commentary about dangerous human-caused global warming. The coverage tends to move in spasms relating to events such as meetings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) or, as at present, to government efforts to introduce penal legislation against carbon dioxide emissions in the vain belief that this will “stop global warming”.

Given that carbon dioxide is indeed a greenhouse gas (albeit a mild and diminishingly effective one at currently increasing levels of atmospheric concentration), and that some human-caused emissions accrue in the atmosphere, the question of dangerous warming was a good one to raise back in the late 1980s. Since then, with the formation of the IPCC, and a parallel huge expansion of research and consultancy money into climate studies, energy studies and climate policy, an intensive effort has been made to identify and measure the human signature in the global temperature record at a cost that probably exceeds $100 billion. And, as Kevin Rudd might put it, “You know what? No such signature has been able to be isolated and measured.”

That, of course, doesn’t mean that humans have no effect on global temperature, because we know that carbon dioxide is a mild greenhouse gas, and we can also measure the local temperature effects of human activity, which are both warming (from the urban heat island effect) and cooling (due to other land-use change, including irrigation). Sum these effects all over the world and obviously there must be a global signal; that we can’t identify and measure it indicates that the signal is so small that it is lost in the noise of natural climate variation.

It is difficult to decide whether to be more astonished by the scientific ignorance or the political stupidity inherent in today’s announcement by the Prime Minister and her Multi-party Climate Change Committee (MCCC) that a tax on carbon dioxide emissions will be introduced on July 1st, 2012.

The ignorance is displayed in the continual reference to a “carbon” tax in a situation where carbon (as opposed to carbon dioxide) has nothing to do with the issue at hand; plus the continual reference to “pollution”, when carbon dioxide is actually an environmentally beneficial trace gas.

The political stupidity is manifest in the reality that the great majority of the Australian public – being fed up to the back teeth with continual and naked lobby group and government propagandizing on the issue – have long ago decided that dangerous global warming is a scam. For example, a recent online poll in The Age resulted in 89% of the respondents answering NO to the question “Would you support a climate tax” (that question, of course, being code for “Would you support a tax on carbon dioxide emissions”).

On top of which there is the minor discrepancy that two of the world’s largest emitters (India and USA) have both indicated this year that they will no longer base their climate policy on advice from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Yet that selfsame flawed and partial advice is the sole justification for the multi-party committee’s intended course of action.

Scientists who venture to make independent statements in public about environmental myths soon come to learn about two post-modern-science tactics used to suppress their views – namely, disinvitation and the application of a brotherhood of silence. How these tactics work is explained in this article.

The modus operandi

A member of the organising committee for one or another conference comes to one of my talks, or chances to meet a friend who has attended. Enthusiasm thereby arises for me to speak at the conference that is being planned. Prompted by the member, the conference committee approves an invitation, which I accept. Later, the Council or governing body of the society in question gets to “rubber stamp” the conference program and someone says: “Bob Carter as a plenary speaker! You must be joking”. The disinvitation follows, sometimes well after the talk has been written and travel booked.

In a variation on this, earlier this year I was invited by our ABC to contribute an opinion piece about climate change to their online blog site, The Drum. The piece was duly written and tendered, only to be declined.

Similarly, strong control has long been exercised by public broadcasters ABC and SBS against the appearance of independent scientists on their TV and radio news and current affairs programs. I first encountered this in 2007, when I participated in a broadcast discussion about Martin Durkin’s epoch-making documentary film, TheGreat Global Warming Swindle. Before the broadcast I had the astonishing experience of being successively invited, disinvited, prevaricated with and then finally invited to participate again, as competing interests inside the ABC battled, as they obviously saw it, to control the outcome of the panel discussion.

I have generally viewed these and similar experiences over the years as amusing irritations that go with the territory of scientific independence. But the matter starts to become offensive, and indeed sinister, when it transpires that scientists from CSIRO, and other IPCC-linked research groups in Australia, have been behind particular disinvitations; or, even more commonly, have refused to participate in public debate on climate change.

The same self-appointed guardians of the sanctity of IPCC climate propaganda also strive ceaselessly to prevent invitations from being issued in the first place. For example, when it was suggested to a Sydney metropolitan university that I might give a talk on the campus, their Distinguished (sic) Professor of Sustainability responded that:

he would not be interested in allowing anyone to present a point of view which did not support the fact that human-generated carbon dioxide has caused global warming.

Que?

Engineers Australia (Sydney)

On July 8th this year, at the invitation of the Chairman of the Electrical & ITE Branch, Engineers Australia Sydney, I delivered a lecture on climate change in Chatswood to an attentive audience of about 55 practicing engineers, retired engineers and engineering students.

EA (Sydney) run a series of about 22 such lectures every year for the continuing professional development of their members. The intent is to impart knowledge to the engineering fraternity on current subjects of interest, and lecturers are generally recognized as leaders in the field of the subject that they present.

When controversial topics are involved, the institute attempts to attract speakers who will illustrate different aspects of the debate, as indeed they did on this occasion. For the lecture that I delivered was intended to be one of a pair, in which the other speaker would explain the reasons behind the federal government’s preference for using United Nations (IPCC) advice as the basis for Australian climate policy.

Significantly, CSIRO were asked, and declined, to provide such a speaker, thereby exemplifying the brotherhood of silence, i.e. the long-held ban that all IPCC-linked research groups strive to inflict upon independent scientists by refusing to debate with them as equals on a public platform. Earlier this year, CSIRO chairperson Megan Clarke boasted that her organisation had 40 persons involved in advising the IPCC, yet not one of them was available to talk to Australia’s major engineering professional institute? Pull the other one, Megan.

Well, if CSIRO is not prepared to explain the basis for government’s science policy then there’s always the universities, so a Director of the Climate Change Research Centre at another Sydney metropolitan university was approached to participate as the second speaker. He too declined on the grounds that the envisaged two-lecture format was “flawed”, adding:

You would not have an “anti-gravity” person debate gravity and since there honestly is no debate in this space in SCIENCE the offer I made a little while ago of offering a full day to detail the science to your members stand(s).

Your society risks falling into the trap of the media in believing there is debate and that is sad, misleading and unfortunate.

This stance was supported by an experienced NSW power engineer who wrote to EA at about the same time to malign my professional standing, and who included, for good measure, a gratuitous remark about the well-regarded London publisher of my recent book on climate change, viz.:

It appears that Bob Carter is representative of the group of the relatively little-published 2% group of scientists who generally are not mainly working in real climate science (Bob Carter is a geologist not a climate scientist, and is published in You-tube and popular magazines, not peer-reviewed journals), who oppose the real climate science consensus. This appears to be correct based on your notice of the meeting and his website. In this case he does not deserve equal time to the 98% of scientists regularly published on climate change in peer-reviewed journals. There is no counter consensus! I question the wisdom of giving this man the Engineers Australia podium.

Furthermore, Stacey International is a publisher of popular works and has no specific scientific credibility.

Climate: The Counter-Consensus by Bob Carter is due for publication in the UK in May, and release in Australia in June.

Click to order

The counter-consensus to quasi-scientific hype and induced panic on climate change is at last assembling. The argument is not in the first place as to whether or not climate change has been taking place, but whether any recent warming of the planet is appreciably due to human activity and how harmful it will prove.

Tom Stacey, in his eloquent and provocative introduction, investigates our tendency to ascribe this and other perceived planetary crises to some inherent fault in ourselves, be it original sin or a basic moral failing.

Climate Change goes on to examine, with thoroughness and impartial expertise, the so-called facts of global warming that are churned out and unquestioningly accepted, while the scientific and media establishments stifle or deride any legitimate expression of an opposing view. In doing so, the book typifies the mission of Independent Minds to replace political correctness and received wisdom with common sense and rational analysis.

On June 23, 1988, a young and previously unknown NASA computer modeller, James Hansen, appeared before a United States Congressional hearing on climate change. On that occasion, Dr. Hansen used a graph to convince his listeners that late 20th century warming was taking place at an accelerated rate, which, it being a scorching summer’s day in Washington, a glance out of the window appeared to confirm.

He wrote later in justification, in the Washington Post (February 11, 1989), that “the evidence for an increasing greenhouse effect is now sufficiently strong that it would have been irresponsible if I had not attempted to alert political leaders”.

Hansen’s testimony was taken up as a lead news story, and within days the great majority of the American public believed that a climate apocalypse was at hand, and the global warming hare was off and running. Thereby, Dr. Hansen became transformed into the climate media star who is shortly going to wow the ingenues in the Adelaide Festival audience.

Fifteen years later, in the Scientific American in March, 2004, Hansen came to write that “Emphasis on extreme scenarios may have been appropriate at one time, when the public and decision-makers were relatively unaware of the global warming issue. Now, however, the need is for demonstrably objective climate forcing scenarios consistent with what is realistic”.

This conversion to honesty came too late, however, for in the intervening years thousands of other climate scientists had meanwhile climbed onto the Hansenist funding gravy-train. Currently, global warming alarmism is fuelled by an estimated worldwide expenditure on related research and greenhouse bureaucracy of more than US$10 billion annually.

A well-accepted aphorism about science, in the context of difference of opinion between two points of view, is “Madam, you are entitled to your own interpretation, but not to your own facts”.

The world stoker of the fires of global warming alarmism, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), cleverly suborns this dictum in two ways.

First, the IPCC accepts advice from influential groups of scientists who treat the data that underpins their published climate interpretations (collected, of course, using public research funds) as their own private property, and refuse to release it to other scientists.

Thus, confronted in 1996 with a request that he provide a U.S. peer-review referee with a copy of the data that underpinned a research paper that he had submitted, U.K. Hadley Climate Research Centre scientist Tom Wigley responded:

First, it is entirely unnecessary to have original “raw” data in order to review a scientific document. I know of no case at all in which such data were required by or provided to a referee …..Second, while the data in question [model output from the U.K. Hadley Centre’s climate model] were generated using taxpayer money, this was U.K. taxpayer money. U.S. scientists therefore have no a priori right to such data. Furthermore, these data belong to individual scientists who produced them, not to the IPCC, and it is up to those scientists to decide who they give their data to.

In the face of such attitudes, which treat the established mores of scientific trust and method with contempt, it is scarcely surprising that it took Canadian statistics expert Steve McIntyre many years to get the primary data released that was used by another Hadley Centre scientist, Keith Briffa, in his published tree-ring reconstructions of past temperature from the Urals region, northern hemisphere. When he finally forced the release of the relevant data, McIntyre quickly proceeded to slay a second climate hockey-stick dragon which – like the first such beast fashioned by U.S. scientist Michael Mann, and widely promulgated by the IPCC – turned out to be based on faulty statistical methodology (see summary by Ross McKitrick here).

Norm Kalmanovitch is a geophysicist with over 35 years of experience, and recently retired from Penn West, a Canadian oil and natural gas energy trust based in Calgary, Alberta. Norm is a member of Friends of Science, a Canadian group that plays the important role of conveying to the public the facts (as opposed to the legends) of global warming and climate change.

Australians will appreciate the fact, too, that Norm is visiting us shortly to compete in the cycling in the Word Masters Games that we are hosting, for by his visit he will contribute to the pre-ETS robust health of our economy. Of course, if the Senate passes the carbon dioxide taxation bill on its second submission next month, then the next time that Norm visits Australia he is going to find a far less wealthy and happy country.

Writing in Benny Peiser’s CCNet newsletter last week, Norm raised the important issue of the complicit liaison that exists between the politicians and the media over the issue of global warming and carbon dioxide taxation, which involves a grim determination to continue to treat the public as mushrooms. Norm writes that:

There were four members of the Alberta Provincial Legislature recognized by the host prior to the presentation. During his presentation, Monckton asked by a show of hands for those who did not support the concept of human caused global warming, and there was a unanimous response; when he asked for the supporters not a single hand went up.

The Alberta Government is spending $2 billion in taxpayers’ money for CCS (carbon capture and sequestration). The rational given by the government for this ridiculous wastage is the IPCC, which they use as their sole basis for scientific support to the exclusion of all with contrary evidence. This means that members of the Alberta Legislature believe in human caused global warming, yet none of the four members in attendance raised their hands to show support for the government position.

This presentation puts the Members of the Legislature in the awkward position of being exposed to the hard physical facts that contradict their own government position. The simple question is what will they do when they get back to the Legislature? The government is already so committed to this endeavour with projects that are already underway, that it is a physical impossibility for the government to stop the process through political means without losing power.

Australian politicians are, of course, in exactly the same position, witness the current imbroglio in which the Liberals are embroiled over the forthcoming reconsideration of the carbon dioxide taxation bill in the Senate. As Norm Kalmanovitch continues:

Not Evil Just Wrong reviewed

“Watch this film, and use the knowledge that you will gain to lobby your Senator to vote against the Australian emissions trading bill.”

Bob Carter

This documentary film is an examination of the human effects of environmental alarmism, with especial reference to the still hypothetical “problem” of human-caused global warming. The film is not so much about the science of climate change as it is about explaining the sociology and politics of what is now perhaps the world’s greatest-ever scare campaign.

Not Evil, Just Wrong examines the issue by interweaving three story lines throughout: first, that of an Ugandan woman who loses her son to malaria; second, the story of workers in a small American town whose employment and wealth is largely generated from the location there of a coal-fired power station, with mines nearby, both of which potentially face closure; and third, the story of the post-Vice Presidential career of Mr Al Gore, and his failure to answer the heartfelt concerns of a young US woman regarding the damage that his policies, if implemented, will wreak on ordinary Americans.

One of the greatest strengths of the film is the archival film footage that the producers have unearthed of some of the key players in the drama. For instance, it is fascinating to see Paul Erlich in grainy black and white asserting back in the 1970s that the world had “no chance of reaching the year 2000”. And Mr Gore lambasting his audience with such gems as “We live in an age of fear” because “global warming caused by burning fossil fuels is going to destroy us and our planet”.

Sensibly, at this point the narrator injects a note of reality with the remark “But is this threat real, and how costly to humanity are the proposed solutions?” The rest of the film addresses these questions.

New interview footage also plays an important part in the film. Besides being interested in hearing what they had to say, the voyeur in me was fascinated to see the background work or home setting of such legendary figures as NASA’s James Hansen (an orderly but paper-stuffed-full office), former U.K. Chancellor Sir Nigel Lawson (immaculate home study surroundings), and doyen of US atmospheric physicists Richard Lindzen (filmed amidst a chaos of books and papers like a squirrel amongst leaf litter).

In what has proved to be a sensational publicity coup for the film, footage of Stanford University’s Stephen Schneider, filmed with his agreement, was withdrawn after legal threats from the University. So, though we see archival footage of Professor Schneider, for his present views – and an explanation as to why why he shifted from being an “ice-age-cometh” alarmist in the 1970s to an “earth-will-be-burned-to-a-cinder” alarmist in the 1990s and beyond – we have to listen to an actor read his words against a blackened screen. Even those most trusting of academic authority must at this point surely be inclined to ask “just what has Professor Schneider got to hide?”

Our ABC: mired in a moral morass

A broadcaster is in trouble when it, rather than the news that it carries, becomes the story. And thus it now often is with the ABC.

Why are today’s media directors and reporters so incapable of making accurate critical judgements on environmental issues?

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It is a commonplace that the mainstream media distort the public debate on environmental issues of the day.

A case in point is the continuing uncritical alarmism about allegedly human-caused global warming, at a time when the globe has been cooling for ten years and human causation remains chimerical. The Fairfax press, together with public broadcasters ABC and SBS, furnish egregious examples of this on a regular basis as they dutifully promulgate – without a trace of critical analysis – the unrestrained, apocalyptic imaginings of the many scientific, environmental and business lobby groups who are now poised to benefit from a carbon dioxide taxation system (aka emissions trading scheme; ETS).

Daily, Australians are confronted on the radio and TV news with politically opportune opinions on “urgent” environmental matters by scientifically ignorant spokespersons for unelected, unaccountable and inexpert lobby groups: Greenpeace, ACF , WWF and the Climate Institute, to name but a few. By what authority does the ABC allow these ecoevangelists to grandstand their relentless and extreme views at public expense – effectively providing their organisations with continuous free advertising at the taxpayers’ expense?

Unbalanced misreporting on global warming and other environmental issues is, of course, deplorable, but it is not in the least surprising. For as we are constantly told, alarmism rather than good news is what the punters and therefore the advertisers demand. As Julian Cribb, one of Australia’s most experienced science editors, has related:

The publication of “bad news” is not a journalistic vice. It’s a clear instruction from the market. It’s what consumers, on average, demand.… As a newspaper editor I knew, as most editors know, that if you print a lot of good news, people stop buying your paper. Conversely, if you publish the correct mix of doom, gloom and disaster, your circulation swells. I have done the experiment.

A recent case history demonstrates well the severity of the misinformation campaign about global warming that our media outlets have now waged with increasing intensity for many years.

On September 7, ABC’s Four Corners programme screened a documentary film entitled “The Coal Nightmare”.

The first sentence of the script intoned by presenter Liz Jackson – “We all know that coal is polluting the planet” - being utterly untrue, the quality of the film as a documentary was doomed from that moment on. Presumably the programme was intended to be a serious contribution to public discussion about global warming, but as with so many other previous ABC efforts on the same topic it turned out instead to be a parody.

One was reminded irresistibly of the famous, scientifically illiterate first sentence of Climate Minister Wong’s Green Paper on emissions trading last year, which contained no fewer than seven basic errors. As Ian Plimer sagely observed, an error rate of almost one mistake for every two words is surely deserving of an entry in the Guinness Book of Records.